Implementing Energy Monitoring

October 21, 2011

Becoming “greener” is a hot topic nowadays, not only amongst the general public but also in high-tech companies. Many businesses are looking into green tech as a way to save energy , save the environment, or to simply save money. One of the primary things you must know when looking into conserving energy is what uses the most energy?

The CEATEC conference was held earlier this month, just outside Tokyo Japan. During this conference, Toshiba and Intel announced plans to release new technology that helps monitors energy usage. With the conscientious turn the world is taking, it doesn’t come as a shock that two major tech companies would have plans to develop something that gives transparency to energy consumption. The following is a brief synopsis of the environmentally aware features these two companies will be implementing in 2012.

PC users will be able to monitor the energy consumption of their PC with the application Intel has developed. With an easy to read dashboard where the data is organized and displayed in graphs, charts, and statistics, you will be able to much more easily see how your computer is using energy.

Toshiba is combining their recently acquired Landish Gyr smart-meter tech with some of their own developments to bring a “smart home” offering to the table. The “smart home” gives people understanding of the energy consumption inside their homes. Toshiba is also creating a variety of cloud technologies for energy monitoring that will be available to many different types of industries including healthcare and city infrastructure.

It is interesting to note that while these two companies are pushing energy monitoring as a large platform for 2012, a few large tech companies in the US are moving away from it. Microsoft is one instance of this; in June they announced that they are discontinuing their Hohm energy-monitoring service. Google is another large US company that is easing out of the green game by closing Google Powermeter.

We can see that though companies in the US are moving away from energy monitoring, companies in Japan are focused on it. What will the future be for the green technology world? It’s hard to say, but if you have any ideas or speculations about this, we would love to hear them!